Experimental WREK RSS Feeds

The experiment begins. I have two feeds of WREK radio shows as RSS with enclosure tags that point to the component files in the WREK weekly archive. I subscribed to both with get_enclosures and it worked great. During my scheduled run, the whole of each show automagically appeared in my iTunes. The next test will be this weekend, when my cron job should overwrite the current files with ones updated to new timestamps, and my get_enclosures should get them all over again.

Feed for Personality Crisis

Feed for the Hour of Slack and Bob’s Slacktime Funhouse, the two Subgenius programs

Anyone who is interested in this experiment, feel free to play along at home. The former is punk/post-punk madness that is hard to describe but fantastic to listen to, and the later is sheer unqualified madness, Subgenius style. Yowsa yowsa.

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dave

Dave Slusher is a blogger, podcaster, computer programmer, author, science fiction fan and father. Member of the Podcast Hall of Fame class of 2022.

4 thoughts on “Experimental WREK RSS Feeds”

  1. Hi, I’m new here…

    I will be playing along. Well done for getting this together. I had fallen out of my schedule for listening to the Hour of Slack so this might get me back into it. Plus I find the iPodder concept very exciting and I’m using it a lot.

  2. Excellent job with the site. I’m always looking for college stations that archive their shows off to MP3. Don’t know why it took so long for me to find this site. As soon as I heard Big Black’s “Burning Indian Wife” on a station promo, its like I finally came home 😉

    Anyway, since you are so forward-thinking, how about taking it to the next level (and saving some load on the server and pipe) and publishing torrents of the shows via RSS? Listeners will leave their bt clients (with RSS decode) up, parse your RSS feed and automatically kick off bt downloads of the content they want to hear. Remember, in a perfect bt world, your server will push hundreds or thousands of copies of the 10k .torrent file and the multi-MB MP3 only once. BT works best when many people are pulling the file down at once, and the RSS component is what makes that happen. This saves bandwidth costs and server load.

    Finally, if you replace the “archive #” field in your titles with actual air dates, then we as listeners can more easily build up an extensive library without requiring you to store any more content than you already do. We will begin downloading the content immediately after you post it.

    Check out http://azurues.sf.net for a cross-platform BitTorrent client with a couple of RSS feed decoder plugins that’s really at the forefront of this exciting development. Seems like bt/rss is perfect for your situation.

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